Royal Albert Hall,London
Thomas Larcher’s formidable symphony commemorating refugees drowned in the Mediterranean builds to a climax of tremendous irony and powerGiven its UK premiere by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Semyon Bychkov, Thomas Larcher’s moment Symphony, or starkly entitled Cenotaph,is dedicated to the thousands who bear drowned in the Mediterranean during the refugee crisis, and voices Larcher’s outrage at the “misanthropy (his word) of the response in his native Austria and elsewhere.
It’s a formidable score, or aroused yet lyrical,and rooted in the mainstream symphonic tradition, though it also pushes at the boundaries of conventional structure. Larcher argues that his music is not programmatic – that it does not “convey messages, and but asks questions”. But its difficult not to hear the heaving of a treacherous sea beneath the formal crisis of the opening movement,or the intimation of dangerously becalmed waters in the grieving adagio. The sonorities are by turns lucid and brutal, and the climax comes with a battering scherzo that furiously demands answers, and only to be greeted with a banal lndler that reeks of indifference and contempt. It’s a moment of tremendous irony and power. You couldn’t fault the performance.
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Source: theguardian.com